I was talking with someone recently about the Two Truths doctrine. It’s not just a doctrine. It’s a pointer. And for some people, it becomes essential—not only for understanding realization, but for living it.
It has real-world implications. It clarifies as realization deepens.
And it can prevent a very specific kind of mistake: using the absolute to sidestep the gritty relative—what you feel, how you react, how you behave, what you’re still not willing to see.
Two Truths: Not Two Truths
Simply stated, the Two Truths doctrine is that the relative and absolute are not two.
So the fact that it’s called the Two Truths doctrine is kind of funny. It’s saying the two truths are also one truth.
That can sound philosophical. It can sound like something you could debate.
But what it points to isn’t primarily an idea. It’s something that clarifies through deeper realization, and it has real implications for how you live.
The Absolute: The First Clear Shift
In this way of speaking, the absolute is the recognition—the direct, clear, unequivocal recognition—that there is no other. There is no separate self.
[Possible clarification needed: “no other” is used as the direct recognition of non-separation, not as a denial of relative experience.]
The struggle, the pushing and pulling on experience, the feeling of discord—all of that is tied into, if not solely a result of, the illusion of separation. The illusion of distinctiveness. We could even say continuity, agency, and so forth.
But when this insight dawns—this first clear shift—you don’t describe it the way I just did. You wouldn’t naturally say all those words.
It’s a felt sense.
It’s the felt sense of: “Oh, I was struggling so much. I was in my head. I was pushing against myself. I was searching for something I didn’t need to search for.”
And it drops.
You feel a palpable weight drop away. You feel an ease. You recognize that moving through the world with ease, lightness, spontaneity—this is far more natural than what you were perceiving before, than the way thoughts put it together when you’re entangled with them.
This is the realization of the absolute.
Again, you don’t need to call it that. In the moment you probably wouldn’t. But later, and for reasons that matter, it can be helpful to talk about it this way.
Why Kensho Is the Beginning
There’s something about that first insight—touching into the absolute—that doesn’t feel like dipping your toe in. It feels like you plunged fully into it. It feels like there is nothing but the absolute.
And that insight is the beginning.
This is very clear in Zen. A Zen teacher, after kensho, will be overjoyed. They’ll go through it with you. They’ll empathize. They’ll congratulate you.
And they’ll casually mention: this is just the beginning.
The door’s open. Your foot’s in the door. Maybe your head’s in the door. There’s more to do.
More clarity. More integration. More insight—depending on the teacher.
Those pointers are smart. They’re skilled ways of saying: this really is the beginning.
Because it can feel like there could be no more. How could there be more than the absolute? How could there be more than everything and nothing? How could there be more than ease and peace and the lack of seeking?
It feels complete.
And a skilled teacher would say: that’s okay. That’s great.
When the Relative Comes Back
Then the relative comes back and says: “Hey, you’ve got some work to do.”
Or you notice—if you’re honest—that you’re contracting, reacting. Sometimes in ways that surprise you.
Anger can come forward when you’ve never experienced anger before, or whatever.
That’s okay. That’s how it’s supposed to go.
That’s part of what “this is the beginning” means.
So that first insight—the first awakening, as I often call it—is realization of the absolute in this paradigm.
The Pitfall: Imputing the Absolute Onto the Relative
One reason this was described so clearly by realized teachers long ago is the second part: it’s easy to overlook or try to sidestep what you don’t want to feel or see about yourself.
It’s easy to ignore self-centered behavior patterns.
Ignore losing your temper.
Just say, “Oh well, that’s just what happens. I just lose my temper every once in a while. That’s just what’s happening.”
That is imputing the absolute onto the relative in an unskillful and inaccurate way.
What’s needed is to embrace the relative again.
Not in the same way as before. It’s not embracing delusion. It’s not embracing the thought-based world of time and dimension and suffering and pushing and pulling and trying to remain a distinct separate one—problems and solutions and seeking.
That’s not the “relative” we’re talking about here.
What “Relative” Means Here
The relative is what’s happening right now.
What are you feeling right now?
Are you feeling shame?
If shame is coming up, that is the relative. That’s the relative experience right now.
To deny that is to try to sidestep it.
And it can take time for people to really see this—for a few reasons, and most of them are good reasons.
Why People Attach to the Absolute
One reason is simple: you are tired of suffering.
You’ve been in the desert so long. When you finally get water, you want to drink a lot of water.
So there can be an attachment to the absolute—even though you realize, in the absolute, there’s nothing to attach to and no one to attach.
Still, the felt pull is: “Bless your heart, you’ve been suffering and now you found the Garden of Eden. I just want to stay here.”
And then when the serpent appears and Eve appears and Adam—and the complexities come back—you’re like: “Well, I’m still in the Garden, but man, things are complicated.”
You’ve got to deal with it.
That’s the relative coming back into shape for you to navigate.
After Kensho: The Ego Returns as Patterns
My Zen teacher would say something like: when you have an awakening, when you have kensho, the ego is kicked off into the distant periphery.
You don’t know it’s there. It feels like it’s gone.
But it’s not gone. It will come back. And it doesn’t take that lying down.
A lot of people would say, “Don’t personify the ego.” And yeah—ego isn’t an actual thing. It’s not a little homunculus inside you pulling levers, making you do stupid shit and throw fits.
That’s not what the ego is.
The ego is a collection of attitudes, beliefs, reactions, tendencies to dissociate, and all of that.
We talk about it this way for practical reasons. “Ego” is a collective bundle of reactions.
From that standpoint, it does tend to come back. It’s reactive. It doesn’t like to be ignored. It rears its head. It finds ways to make you unconscious.
That’s part of what ego does.
[Possible clarification needed: “ego returns” is shorthand for patterns/tendencies reasserting, not a literal inner agent.]
So you start to feel these things coming back.
And it doesn’t mean you’re losing anything fundamental.
You Don’t Lose the Absolute
When someone is in this space—“God, I don’t want all this to come back, there’s so much trauma, there’s so much”—I’ll ask:
But that initial insight… is it still here?
And they’ll say: yes.
That’s what’s fascinating.
Even when the relative starts to show itself—not the mind-identified relative, but the down-and-dirty gritty physicality of being alive—when it comes back and reintroduces you to itself like an old friend you wanted to pretend you never knew…
You never lose the absolute aspect.
In fact, you can’t have known the relative with this clarity without realizing the absolute.
This is where the Two Truths doctrine starts.
Why the Relative Becomes Unavoidable
It’s almost non-dual, in a sense. You can’t avoid the emotion now. You have to feel it.
Adyashanti might call this redemptive love. That’s a skillful phrase, because you’re taught how to love everything.
You have to, at some point.
You won’t love it at first. You’ll fight it. You’ll hate it. You’ll push it away. You’ll dissociate. You’ll justify distracting yourself—whatever.
Totally normal.
But at some point you start to feel: “Oh. I can find love here. I can find connection here.”
And the reason you can get that close is because you realized the absolute.
Without the absolute, you won’t really know the relative. You’ll just know the mind-identified, dissociated relative.
When you wake up to the absolute, now you have access back to the relative.
The Root of Dissociation: Feeling the Human Body
Without getting too much into the mechanics of awakening, you find the root of why you dissociated in the first place.
You were dissociating from the feelings of being in a human body.
You were dissociating from the intensity of sensation and emotion.
Now you feel it, and you can’t dissociate. It’s like: “I have to feel all this.”
And it’s okay.
You learn that you can. You learn that—eventually—you want to.
So now you start to regain your sea legs in the relative.
You start to reinhabit what it means to be a human in physicality, which includes everything.
Not just being strong and healthy.
It includes being sick.
It includes the fact that you’re going to die.
It includes the fact that some things are more powerful than your will. Being around certain people may trigger experiences within you that you can’t control. In the past, you thought you could. Now you realize you can’t.
So you start to manage boundaries—energetic boundaries.
Things look different here.
That’s the relative.
Maturity in the Relative: Making Friends With Shadow
As you stop resisting the relative, you make friends with it.
You make friends with shadow.
You make friends with the inner child, the hurt one inside, the hurt ones inside.
You realize your reactivity toward others is on you—and unnecessary.
You start to feel much more calm.
You touch deep spaces and you make allies, friends with shame, guilt, fear, grief, anger.
Now you’re mature in the relative for real.
This is deeper realization.
Interpenetration: When the Absolute Shows Up as the Relative
At this point, most people start having experiences of interpenetration.
I can’t tell you exactly what interpenetration is like. But it’s like all of that expansiveness of the first awakening—unbound consciousness, Self with a capital S, everything as this unbound conscious self—shows up as what we call the physical, even though it’s not physical.
It is the sound.
It is the sensation of being in a body.
It is the intensity.
It is the light.
It is movement.
It is dynamism.
[Possible clarification needed: “interpenetration” is used as an experiential pointer, not a concept to solve.]
Shamanic Realms (and a Caution)
This is where the shamanic realms can be helpful or come in powerfully.
Some people have access to that more than others.
It can be a good attunement to work with someone who is both awake and has shamanic energetic attunement, because now you’re working at an energetic level. You’re starting to untie deep karmic knots.
But I should say briefly: I don’t equate shamanism or shamanic attunement with awakening. It’s not the same thing.
There are people with shamanic attunement who aren’t awake, or maybe they’ve had early awakening, but they haven’t done the shadow work themselves.
They’re powerful. They can see into you. They may see your shadow, but they don’t see their own.
So be aware: that happens.
In here, you’re in energetic realms—the realms of physicality and what’s even before physicality. The formless form. The formlessness of the body and spirit and energetics.
And this is where interpenetration of relative and absolute starts to find its balance.
How Balance Shows Up
It finds its balance in several ways:
- through your own energetic instinct that you align with more and more
- through practical boundaries
- through emotional clarity
- through deepening insight in the awakening path itself—non-dual, anatta
If you go through properly in that way, with relative and absolute interpenetrating more and more—integration, disintegration, more interpenetration—just like the ninth ox herding picture says…
You find yourself in a good place.
You move through the world understanding what mature realization actually is.
Mature both in the insight pathway and in the shadow work pathway.
And where those meet, there can be aspects that are shamanic—not all of it, but that’s one place the shamanic realm can shine, with a really mature guide. It’s critical to be careful with shamanic energy.
The Rollercoaster: Me-ing and Being
At some point it can feel like a rollercoaster.
Like flip-flopping.
Like me-ing and being.
You feel contracted into a sense of self or separation—even though you know there isn’t one. There’s no real seeking, but there is contraction. There may be a tendency to react.
Other times it’s total bliss. Peace. Equanimity. Flow. Spontaneity.
And those can go back and forth.
To me, that’s when you’re starting to find the balance of relative and absolute. You’re finding the interpenetration point: clarity, balance, equanimity, equilibrium.
And that point isn’t a place.
It’s a moving dynamic.
This is critical: there is no place you’re going to land. There is no place you’re going to anchor yourself.
When It Becomes Absurd to Separate Relative and Absolute
At some point, relative and absolute become totally interpenetrated.
Then it becomes absurd to talk about them as separate things.
You see they always were the same thing.
In the same way that at some point you see nirvana and samsara—extinction and dukkha, unsatisfactoriness, what we sometimes call suffering—they’re not two either.
They are the same thing.
This is deep insight. Mature insight.
Both in the relative human emotional spectrum and in the insight spectrum.
This is what the Two Truths doctrine points to.
It’s a progression.
A Progression You Can’t Grasp Philosophically
The reason I thought of talking about this is that the person I was speaking with was approaching it philosophically.
They admitted: “I was thinking about this philosophically and it doesn’t make sense. How can it be this and it’s this?”
What struck me is that understanding relative and absolute as one is a hard-earned insight.
It’s not something you can understand philosophically. It’s not.
You might convince yourself you understand it philosophically, and that’s fine, but that’s not what the insight points to.
That’s not what Tozan’s fourth and fifth rank point to.
It’s hard-won.
Hard-won meaning through vulnerability, through massive ego attrition, through a lot of shadow work.
When it’s realized, it’s beautiful. Humbling. Natural. Brilliant.
It’s like saying:
Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.
Form is no other than emptiness.
Emptiness is no other than form.
That makes no damn sense to the philosophical mind, really.
You might find a way to imagine it visually, or use some scientific model—quantum field theory or something—but that’s all in your mind.
You can live it.
You can live form is emptiness and emptiness is form.
You can move through the world with that insight in your marrow.
Two Truths as an Attunement
That’s the value of the Two Truths doctrine to me.
It’s not something to use as a litmus test.
It’s not really an inquiry.
It’s like an old master you can reference every once in a while, and it nods. It says: “Yep, that’s it.”
It’s an attunement.
It’s like an archetype.
Archetypes don’t tell you exactly what to do. They don’t give you a specific practice.
They’re energies. They’re attunements. They’re powerful.
This is one of them. It has that kind of power—if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
It may not resonate with you. But if it does, it’s a powerful attunement.
And if you approach it purely psychologically or logically—forget it.
It’s meaningless.